Expat Australia News

Despite greater efforts to ensure more university teachers in Saudi Arabia are from the Gulf state, around a third of all lecturers at government institutions are expats.
A recent government report showed that out of 52,617 professors and teaching assistants in colleges nationwide, 15,977 are from outside Saudi Arabia, and just 4,555 are women.
The institutions with the highest percentage of teachers from outside the country are King Saud University, Umm Al-Qura University, King Abdulaziz University and Imam Mohammed bin Saud...

An Australian woman living in Abu Dhabi has been jailed for posting “bad words” on Facebook.
Thirty-nine-year-old Jodi Magi uploaded a photo on the social media site that she had taken of a vehicle taking up two disabled parking spaces in front her apartment in the UAE capital.
The licence number was blanked out and no identifiable details were posted, according to reports in Australia. However, Magi found herself in hot water when someone filed a complaint against her for “writing bad words” about someone else and was...

A Saudi Arabian court has jailed a woman has ordered her to pay back the SR300,000 ($US80,000) she took from a Yemeni expat after saying that she would obtain Saudi nationality for him.
The victim’s lawyer, Khalid Al-Yafie, said that the Saudi woman had ruined his client’s reputation in a separate incident which involved her posting a video on social media in which a group of divorcees claimed he was an exploiter.
Al-Yafie explained that his client had dropped the charges against the divorces who appeared in the video because he...

Two men who fled Bali have received 15-year jail sentences for killing Australian businessman Robert Ellis after being convicted of premeditated murder.
Martin Ngongo Bili and Adolf Malo Rangga were handed 15 years in prison for the role they played in the killing of the 60-yrar-old expat. However, the defence reacted angrily after the pair received longer sentences than the victim’s wife, who organised the murder.
Noor Ellis, who had been married to the wealthy businessman for 25 years, was jailed for 12 years in June for paying...

Lloyds Bank is to expand its London Expat Service to allow the increasing number of non-domiciles moving to the UK to access it.
The London Expat Service launched last year in one of Lloyds’s offices in London, and is now available in various locations across the capital.
The initiative aims to offer the bank’s day-to-day retail services as well as provide access to specialist British and international wealth advisers so clients relocating to the UK can enjoy a face-to-face experience.
Lloyds Bank’s international private...

The high demand for Filipino workers in a number of Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and UAE, has increased the remittance value during the opening months of 2015.
Philippines’ central bank governor Amando Tetangco said that a total of US$8.6bn was sent home by Filipinos across the globe between January and April – 5.1 per cent higher than the same period in 2015.
The majority of the funds were sent from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the UK, the US, Hong Kong, Canada, Singapore and Japan, according to the bank.
The Philippine...

The government of Saudi Arabia has refuted allegations by the UN that that it and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations were guilty of not respecting expat workers’ rights.
The Kingdom’s permanent resident at the UN in Geneva, Faisal bin Hassan Trad, said the claims, which were published in a report by Human Rights Commissioner Prince Zaid bin Raad Al-Hussain, were false.
Trad, who spoke at a Human Rights Council meeting on migrant workers, refuted the allegations and requested that Al-Hussain reviewed where he had...

Expatriate workers in the oil-rich Gulf states sent home over US$100bn in remittances in 2014, according to a recent economic report.
In a strong indication of growth, the figure marked a two-fold increase since 2010, said Kuwait Financial Center (Markaz) head of economic research Raghu Mandagoathur.
About 25 million expats reside in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations of United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, which roughly equates to the same number of locals in the states.
The report, which...

Thai police have thrown out the case against an Australian expat on the island of Phuket who was suspected carrying out the fatal stabbing of a nightclub worker in Patong.
After studying CCTV footage that showed Mark Pendlebury acted in self defence when attacked by Sanya Khlueawaengmon, 25, on 11 March, police decided to drop the case.
Lieutenant Colonel Jessada Saengsuree from the Patong Police said that the footage, which they could not be shown to the public at present, showed that a group of men attacked Pendlebury before he...

The Philippines capital Manila is the 136th most livable city in the world for expats, according to the 2015 Quality of Living Rankings, which featured a total of 230 cities.
The rankings, compiled by US global human resource consulting company Mercer, listed the Austrian capital Vienna as number one, with Switzerland’s Zurich and New Zealand’s Auckland taking up the nest two spots respectively.
Meanwhile, most cities in the same region as Manila came above it, with Singapore in 26th place, Tokyo in 44th, Hong Kong in 70th and...